Joyful Tech: GraphQL, Chrome Security, and Firebug

Here at Bendyworks our mission statement is to share joy and success in our craft so every once in a while we like to highlight tech news that makes us joyful. Here are some interesting things we saw from Oct 21st through Oct 27th.

So it’s sad that Firebug is now reaching end-of-life in the Firefox browser, with the release of Firefox Quantum (version 57) next month. The good news is that all the capabilities of Firebug are now present in current Firefox Developer Tools.

Apollo Client is the ultra-flexible, community-driven GraphQL client for React, Vue.js, Angular, and other JavaScript platforms. You just describe your data requirements with a GraphQL query, and Apollo Client fetches and manages the data for you.

Chrome was founded to push the web forward, and a key part of that is enabling developers to improve their user experience. Although current tools allow developers to understand how real-world users experience their own sites, they have never provided insight into comparisons with other sites or macro user experience trends across the web.

About a year ago, we announced that we would begin marking all sites that are not encrypted with HTTPS as “not secure” in Chrome. We wanted to help people understand when the site they're on is not secure, and at the same time, provide motivation to that site's owner to improve the security of their site. We knew this would take some time, and so we started by only marking pages without encryption that collect passwords and credit cards.

The Ionic team had an incredibly busy and productive summer and rolled into a very productive fall. We released some new projects, soft launched our new Ionic Pro commercial offering, and are growing the team to make Ionic Framework and our services around it better and better.

At the Chrome Developer Summit 2017 (October 2017) we’ve announced a new technology called Trusted Web activities which are now available in Chrome’s Canary channel. Trusted Web activities are a new way to integrate your web-app content such as your PWA with your Android app using a similar protocol to Chrome Custom Tabs.

Last night I was rooting around in the cellars of a particularly large codebase and stumbled upon our normalize.css which makes sure that all of our markup renders in a similar way across different browsers. I gave it a quick skim and found styles for a rather peculiar element called <output> that I'd never seen or even heard of before.

Currently, importing JavaScript modules is completely static, and developers cannot import modules based on runtime conditions, like whether a user is logged in. Starting in this release, the import(specifier) syntax now allows developers to dynamically load code into modules and scripts at runtime. This can be used for lazy loading a script only when it’s needed, which improves performance of the application.

The new Open Images dataset gives us everything we need to train computer vision models, and just happens to be perfect for a demo! Tensorflow’s Object Detection API and its ability to handle large volumes of data make it a perfect choice

Performance budgets are an essential but under-appreciated part of product success and team health. Most partners we work with are not aware of the real-world operating environment and make inappropriate technology choices as a result.